Monday, July 19, 2004

The customer is sometimes right

The band Saturday night was brilliant. A local band called Citizen Smiffy. Fronted by Colin Smith, who does a great impression of Sting, from “The Police”. So as you can imagine they do a fair few Police covcrs. There were a couple of surprise guest artists on stage. Giz Butt, who was the lead guitarist from The Prodigy, and now has another band whose name I don’t recall, and the drummer from The Damned and Morrissey. Both played brilliantly. Giz or Graham teaches guitar here in Peterborough, so if you’ve got a spare £20 a lesson, you too can be taught guitar by the great Giz Butt. No he didn’t ask me to plug his guitar school. It’s just that another friend of mine who also teaches guitar, was moaning that he can only get away with charging £14 a lesson.
“yeah but you aint Giz Butt.” I told him.
We’ve got a new website for my band. There’s not much on it right now. Some of the photo’s are loaded, not the blurb, just the titles. But for what it’s worth the link is on the right.
It’s a beautiful morning the sky is blue and all is quiet. It reminds me of when I used to live in Cyprus. First thing in the morning the sea was very calm. Hardly any waves just a gentle shushing on the pebbles of the beach. Our school didn’t have a swimming pool so early in the morning we’d all take a coach down to the beach for our swimming lessons. We’d all jump into the sea and start splashing about. No life guards, just the teacher walking up and down the beach watching us. I can’t imagine that happening now. All this health and safety regulations stuff.
Another thing that probably wouldn’t happen is the annual trip to the cliff edge to watch the Red Arrows. As you guessed we lived on the coast at RAF Episkopi. Every year the Red Arrows would come over and do a few practice shows so we’d all go to the cliff top and watch. Now this is a million times better than going to an air show. Because they’d come in from over the sea skimming the waves. So we’d be actually looking down on them, then they’d pull up sharply and zoom over our heads. They got quite close the sound was incredible. Kids would be screaming especially the younger ones. Great fun.
I noticed in the paper yesterday that yet another army recruit had died after a one and a half mile run. Hmmm yet another enquiry. OK I’m sorry for the guys family and friends and especially sorry for the guy himself having died so young. But this is life. This is the army, they have to train their people to be tough, fit, capable. The training has to be hard if it wasn’t there’d be no point. We might as well send in a platoon of hairdressers to knock out an enemy position. We are being protected too much. Protected to a ridiculous degree, where people are now automatically looking to blame someone else when something goes wrong, going straight to a lawyer for comensation because they’ve been daft enough to hurt themselves.
One of the most ridiculous things I’ve read in a long time was this guy in the USA who bought an RV he was driving down a long straight road and decided to make himself a coffee so he got out the driving seat and went to the back of the RV. Meanwhile the RV carried on down the road until it left the road and turned over a few times. It was a right off. The RV’s owner sued the company for not telling him that the vehicle would not drive it self. No where in the manual does it say that he mustn’t let the vehicle drive it self. Believe it or not he won his case. I bought a guitar lead no where in the instructions does it say I mustn’t wrap it round my neck or round the neck of anyone else in case they choked. So if I did could I sue the company who made the lead because they hadn’t told me that I shouldn’t in the instructions? It’s common sense. People are not allowed to have common sense anymore, they’re not expected to have it, because we have all these rules and regulations that protect us from our own stupidity. Eventually people will no longer be able to think for themselves. In Sainsburys I saw a packet of Peanuts. On it was written a warning “This product contains nuts” No shit!
Here’s another thing that pisses me off. “The customer is always right”. Well not in my shop they aint. Who the hell thought that one up? The customer is usually wrong. They start shouting to you about going to trading standards and getting a lawyer etc etc So you open the phone book and give them the number of the trading standards office and say “Off you go. Give them a call.” And they just stand there unable to say a word because they know they’re wrong and they know they were just try to pull a fast one on you. They know it, you know it but there’s always this “Customer is always right” thing that makes people believe they can get away with murder. I am very tolerant, very fair and I’ll bend over backward to put right something I know to be my fault. But I wont let customers take the piss. I don’t care how loudly they shout the customer is NOT always right.